TO FACE OUR PAST
Earlier this year, Montgomery, Alabama, saw the opening of the National Memorial to Peace and Justice, the first public memorial dedicated to victims of slavery and racial terror in the United States. At the center of the six-acre site you’ll find 800 six-foot-tall rusted-steel monuments—one for every U.S. county where a lynching took place from 1877 through 1950. Each is engraved with the names of the deceased, some “Unknown.” As you descend into the space, the steel columns—suspended higher and higher above your head—evoke hanging bodies. Elsewhere on the memorial grounds, duplicate pillars stand. The hope is that each county with a history of lynching will claim its column and find an appropriate site to display it.
A short walk from the new memorial, the Legacy Museum, located in a former warehouse where slaves), founded in 1989 by Bryan Stevenson. The lawyer, human rights activist, MacArthur Fellow, and author of the best-selling book began planning the project in 2010. We talked to him about the power of public monuments and the impact he hopes the memorial and museum will have.
